CHAPTER XIII - Kensal Green
Despite its favourable topographical situation,
on high, well-drained ground overlooking
most of North Kensington, the
area now known as Kensal Green and Kensal
Town has suffered from a long series of misfortunes.
Until 1900 some 144 acres of it formed a
detached portion of the parish of St. Luke's,
Chelsea, from whose distant Vestry Hall it had
hitherto been administered. When the London
Government Act of 1899 provided that this
locality should be annexed in part to the new
Borough of Kensington and in part to that of
Paddington, the Kensington Vestry, in the last
weeks of its life, offered strenuous, though unsuccessful,
opposition to this sensible rationalization
of boundaries. (ref. 1) The area then known as
Kensal New Town, bounded on the north by the
canal, was incorporated into the Borough of
Kensington, to be administered from the Town
Hall in Kensington, High Street, which was not
much nearer than that of Chelsea.
By this time the isolation of this remote district
had been greatly increased by the construction
of the Paddington branch of the Grand Junction
Canal, opened in 1801, and of the Great Western
Railway, opened in 1838. These two barriers,
each for many years traversed from north to south
by only one public bridge, (fn. a) extended in approximately
parallel courses across the neighbourhood
of Kensal Green, and effectively segregated the
area between them. Both the landowners of the
detached portion of Chelsea—All Souls College,
Oxford, and William Kinnaird Jenkins, esquire (ref. 2)
were in 1845 absentees, who took no direct personal
interest in their properties, and so too were
the owners of the adjoining lands in the parish of
Kensington, the Talbot and St. Quintin families.
Further west the General Cemetery Company had
in 1831 bought fifty-four acres of land (ref. 3) for use as
a burial ground, which had not increased Kensal
Green's social cachet as a place of residence; and
in 1845 the Western Gas Company had opened a
gasworks on land (previously the property of
Sir George Talbot) with frontages to both the
canal and the railway. When building development
on a significant scale began in the early
1840's, several of the ingredients for the making
of a slum were, in fact, already present.
The earliest building was on Jenkins's land.
Since at least 1838 W. K. Jenkins had been
speculating in Paddington in the vicinity of
Hereford and Garway Roads, and in 1844 he
acquired the interest of his kinsman, W. H.
Jenkins, in twenty-eight acres of the Ladbroke
estate in Kensington around Pembridge Villas
(see page 260). In all these speculations Jenkins
acted through his solicitors, Budd and Hayes of
Bedford Row, and under their aegis West Row,
Middle Row, East Row and part of Southern
Row were laid out between 1841 and 1851 with
small two-storey cottages, many with small front
gardens. (ref. 4) The sole survivors of this phase of
development are a few workshops in Southern
Row, whose pantiled roofs can still be seen from
the railway line, and the small chapel in MiddleRow,
which was built by Michael Puddefoot in
1852. (ref. 5) Laundry work provided the principal
source of employment for the inhabitants, many
of the men being comfortably supported by the
labours of their wives, while others worked at the
gasworks. Rustic pursuits and disorders still prevailed
in the 1850's and 1860's, and gipsies
sometimes wintered here. (ref. 6)
Except in the case of the gasworks, whose
premises were gradually expanded westward until
they eventually occupied all of the land to the west
of Ladbroke Grove between the railway and the
canal, little more building took place until the
mid 1860's, when C. H. Blake's purchase of the
Portobello estate from the Misses Talbot (see page 306)
included some sixteen acres to the
north of the railway. This was in the vicinity of
Bosworth Road, Hazlewood Crescent, Edenham
Street and Southam Street, where the building of
tightly-packed ranges of small narrow houses
proceeded rapidly in the 1860's and 1870's, every
room being occupied as fast as the houses were
completed. Access to this new quarter was greatly
improved by the extension of Golborne Road
north-eastward over the railway by another
bridge, (fn. b) and by the early 1880's building development
had been substantially finished. Many of the
residents were railwaymen, while others were
migrants whose previous homes in the central
districts of London had been demolished. There
were no front gardens here, and the social climate
of this area was evidently always wholly urban in
character. (ref. 9)
With the establishment of schools, mission
halls, chapels and churches (St. Andrew and St.
Philip in 1870, Our Lady of the Holy Souls in
1882 and St. Thomas in 1889) Kensal Green
gradually acquired the usual adjuncts of a Victorian
suburb. In 1903, however, Charles Booth,
evidently referring only to the area developed by
Jenkins, could still state that Kensal New Town
'retains yet something of the appearance of a
village, trampled under foot by the advance of
London, but still able to show cottages and gardens;
and gateways between houses in its streets
leading back to open spaces, suggestive of the
paddock and pony of days gone by'. Over 55
per cent of the inhabitants were, nevertheless,
classified as 'in poverty', (ref. 10) and when Emslie J.
Horniman presented an acre of ground between
East Row and Bosworth Road to the London
County Council in 1911 for recreational purposes
he stated that there was then 'no place
within a mile or more where children could play,
except in the streets, nor anywhere for the
mothers and old people to rest'. (ref. 11)
(fn. c) <C. F. A. Voysey designed the garden, both the layout and architectural parts; the ironwork was by W. B. Reynolds (see LCC Ceremonial Pamphlets in the LMA).>
Severe overcrowding had long prevailed in and
around Southam Street, where in 1923 some 140
houses contained 2,500 inhabitants. (ref. 12) In 1925 the
Kensington Borough Council acquired two
derelict houses in Bosworth Road and converted
them into twelve flats, (ref. 13) and in 1928–9 the common
lodging house for men in Kensal Road was
renovated and reopened as a refuge for women
under the auspices of Mrs. Cecil Chesterton.
Large-scale redevelopment did not, however, get
under way until 1933, when the Borough Council,
acting in response to a circular issued by the
Minister of Health, adopted a five-year programme
of clearance and improvement. (ref. 14) Five
clearance areas were declared in Kensal Town, (ref. 15)
and by 1938 ninety-nine new flats had been built
or were in course of building (thirty of them by the
Kensington Housing Trust) (ref. 16) plus another sixtyeight
by the Gas Light and Coke Company on
land fronting Ladbroke Grove. (ref. 17)
(fn. d) Fifteen acres
in and around Southam Street had also been
declared an improvement area. Here 5,818 people
lived at a density of 390 to the acre, mostly in the
four-storey terrace houses built under C. H.
Blake's auspices in the 1860's and 1870's. By
1935 all of the 778 basement rooms had been
closed and vacated, and 1,802 of the inhabitants
of the area had been removed, many of them to
the new flats in course of building at this time in
Dalgarno Gardens. The population of the
Southam Street area was thus reduced by 29
per cent, and the houses were thoroughly renovated. (ref. 19)
During the war of 1939–45, however, housing
conditions in the Southam Street area again deteriorated
very rapidly, and after slum clearance
work had been resumed in 1950, some twenty
acres bounded by Bosworth Road, Kensal Road
and the railway were scheduled for clearance. The
eleven acres between Bosworth Road and Golborne
Road were redeveloped by the Borough
Council to the designs of Sir William (now Lord)
Holford, (ref. 20) the last of the 549 flats provided there
being opened in 1969. (ref. 21) To the east of Golborne
Road the remainder of the twenty scheduled
acres is now (1972) in course of redevelopment
by the Greater London Council to the designs of
Erno Goldfinger and Associates. The only parts
of Kensal Town which are still of recognizably
nineteenth-century origin are the area between
Bosworth Road and Ladbroke Grove and the
thin strip between Kensal Road and the canal.
The Cemetery of All Souls, Kensal Green
Plates 29, 30, 31 and 32; fig. 89
During the 1820's, when the population of the
whole of London increased by some 20 per cent,
the insanitary and indecent conditions which
prevailed in the already grossly overcrowded
graveyards of the metropolis first began to attract
public attention. Some of these ancient burial
grounds contained over 3,000 bodies per acre,
and the average number of new burials sometimes
exceeded 200 per acre per year. Often the rate
of new interments exceeded the rate of decay,
the level of the ground rose, and hideous means
were employed by the grave-diggers to provide
space for new intakes. (ref. 22) It was in order to alleviate
this situation that Parliament, between 1832
and 1847, authorized the establishment of eight
commercial cemetery companies in the vicinity of
London. The first of these new cemeteries was
that of the General Cemetery Company at
Kensal Green.
The leader in the public demand for reform
was George Frederick Carden, a barrister, who
first concerned himself in the matter in 1824. (ref. 23)
In the following year he issued a prospectus for
the General Burial Grounds Association, in which
he advocated the establishment of a cemetery on
the lines of that of Père-Lachaise in Paris, and
stated that a suitable site (at Primrose Hill) was
available. Although the public meeting which he
had intended to hold was cancelled owing to the
financial crisis of 1825, (ref. 24) Carden was doubtless
soon encouraged by the growing interest displayed
by architects and men of business. In 1824
Thomas Willson had exhibited at the Royal
Academy designs for a 'Pyramid Cemetery for
the Metropolis', a multi-storey affair very economical
in its use of land, (ref. 25) which Carden did not
support, and in 1827 A. C. Pugin (in association,
it is said, with Marc Isambard Brunel) exhibited
more orthodox plans in the Gothic manner. (ref. 26)
At about this time, too, a new cemetery was
established in Liverpool, which within two
years was paying a dividend of 8 per cent. (ref. 27)
In February 1830 Carden convened a meeting
at his chambers at which a provisional committee
was formed. (ref. 24) In April an exhibition (almost
certainly prompted by Carden) was held in
Parliament Street, conveniently close to the
House of Commons, of plans by Francis Goodwin
for a cemetery equipped with temples, mausolea,
cloisters and catacombs, 'a very magnificent display
of architecture' all set within forty-two
acres of garden; (ref. 28) and in May one of Carden's
supporters, Andrew Spottiswoode, M.P., presented
a petition to the Commons on Carden's
behalf praying for the removal of the metropolitan
graveyards 'to places where they would be
less prejudicial to the health of the inhabitants'. (ref. 29)
This was immediately followed up by the issue
of another prospectus, this one being for an
intended General Cemetery Company. (ref. 24)
In the following two months, June and July
1830, Carden held two public meetings at the
Freemasons' Tavern. Resolutions were passed by
which the intended General Cemetery Company
was established and officers and a provisional committee
appointed; aristocratic patronage for the
project was also secured by the election of a bevy
of titled vice-presidents. Subscriptions were invited
at £25 per share, and in order to prevent
unseemly speculation in a matter concerned with
Christian burial, it was decided that the shares
should not be transferable until three fifths of their
value had been paid up by the original subscriber.
Carden himself was elected treasurer. (ref. 30)
One of the members of the provisional committee
was Sir John Dean Paul, partner in the
firm of Strahan, Paul, Paul and Bates, bankers of
the Strand, who was soon to come into collision
with Carden. (ref. 31) It was he who found and conditionally
purchased fifty-four acres of land at
Kensal Green for the 'moderate' price of £9,500
(i.e.£174 per acre), and at the proprietors' meeting
held in July 1831 this initiative was confirmed.
It was also decided to apply to Parliament for an
Act of incorporation for the company. (ref. 32)
This was an unusually propitious moment to
make such an application, for in October 1831
England began to experience its first cholera
epidemic, and many people thought that cholera
was propagated by the evil miasmas which arose
from the decaying matter present, among other
places, in overcrowded graveyards. In July 1832
the Bill 'for establishing a General Cemetery for
the Interment of the Dead in the Neighbourhood
of the Metropolis' received the royal assent. It
incorporated the General Cemetery Company,
authorized it to raise up to £45,000 in shares of
£25, buy up to eighty acres of land and build a
cemetery and a Church of England chapel.
To obviate the opposition of the metropolitan
clergy, many of whom depended in substantial
measure for their incomes upon the revenues from
burial fees, the Act also provided that for each
burial in the cemetery a fee ranging from 1s. 6d.
to 5s. (depending on the type of grave) should be
paid to the incumbent of the parish in which each
body originated. (ref. 33)
By this time the infant company was already
deeply involved in the architectural squabbles
which eventually culminated in the triumph of
Sir John Dean Paul and the dismissal of G. F.
Carden. Their quarrel seems to have centred
round the rival merits of the Grecian style,
advocated by Paul, and the Gothic, championed
by Carden; but no doubt there was also a conflict
of personalities, as well as an embarras de richesse
in the sheer number of architects anxious to design
the cemetery.
To start with, at least three of the shareholders
were architects—A. C. Pugin and Thomas
Willson, whose interest in this field has already
been mentioned, and John William Griffith,
surveyor to the parish of St. Botolph, Aldersgate,
and to the London estates of St. John's College,
Cambridge, (ref. 25) who was probably supported by
Paul and who was ultimately to be the author of
the executed designs for the two chapels and the
principal entrance gateway. At the time of its
formation in February 1830 the provisional committee
had nevertheless invited Benjamin Wyatt
to act as architect, but he had declined, and recommended
Charles Fowler instead. This proposal
was not taken up, however, and in June both
Francis Goodwin and Thomas Willson were
drawing the committee's attention to their respective
designs. It was at this time that the committee
accepted Carden's view that the cemetery
should follow the example of that of Père-Lachaise,
and that the public should be 'at liberty to
erect what description of monuments they please'. (ref. 34)
Thereafter the committee was for some months
engaged in finding and provisionally purchasing a
site. The land ultimately acquired was, indeed,
extremely suitable. It enjoyed a high, welldrained
situation, 'surrounded by beautiful scenery',
and with good access to London both by road
along the Harrow Road and by water along the
Grand Junction Canal, which extended across
the site. (ref. 32)
(fn. e)
The next problem before the committee was
the layout of its new property. In September 1831
it was resolved to consult John Nash, and shortly
afterwards Sir John Dean Paul presented a sketch
'drawn under the eye of Mr Nash' by Mr. Liddell,
who had worked in the office of the Commissioners
of Woods and Forests under Nash. J. W. Griffith
was, however, instructed to prepare plans and
sections of the ground, and shortly afterwards
Liddell withdrew. In October Griffith produced
working drawings for a boundary wall, and
building tenders were invited. Later in the year
he, Paul and Pugin were all concerning themselves
in the planting of trees, and it might therefore
be conjectured that Griffith had become
responsible for the general layout. But in August
1832 (? John) Hanson, architect, was reporting
to the directors about the execution of Liddell's
plan, which was then adopted. The precise authorship
of the design for the layout therefore remains
in doubt. (ref. 35)
In the meantime the committee had decided
that for the design of the buildings a competition
should be held, and in November 1831 a premium
of one hundred guineas was offered for the best
plans for a chapel with ample vaults and for an
entrance gateway with lodges. The total cost
was not to exceed £10,000 for the chapel and
£3,000 for the gateway. (ref. 36)
Griffith did not enter the competition, for he
was appointed one of the judges, but he was
nevertheless constantly strengthening his position
with the company. In January 1832 he was
negotiating on its behalf with Robert Stephenson,
engineer of the London and Birmingham Railway,
over that company's intention to build a
tunnel under the northern extremity of the site
of the cemetery; and in March he was instructed
to proceed with the erection of the brick wall to
enclose the cemetery. William Chadwick of
Southwark was the builder of this wall, and Sir
John Soane, for whom he had previously worked,
was asked to supply a testimonial as to his capability. (ref. 37)
There were forty-six entrants for the competition,
and in March 1832 the judges (Griffith,
Paul, Pugin, Carden and two others) awarded the
premium to H. E. Kendall, senior, for his Gothic
design, which included a water-gate from the
canal. (ref. 38) This verdict was, however, contested at
the next meeting of the committee, when one
member (probably supported by Paul) stated that
he would press for it to be rescinded. Eventually
it was decided to leave the matter to the directors
who would be appointed shortly after the Bill
(then still in progress through Parliament) had
received the royal assent. (ref. 39)
At the shareholders' meeting held immediately
after the incorporation of the company in July,
Paul was elected treasurer in place of Carden, who
was reduced to the position of registrar. (ref. 40) Prolonged
architectural discussions evidently ensued
among the directors, and in October the views
of Cockerell, Pennethorne, Smirke and Wyatville
were all solicited, (ref. 41) Kendall meanwhile busying
himself with the publication of his Gothic
designs. (ref. 38) The Gothic faction was, however, probably
greatly weakened by the death of Pugin in
December 1832, and the matter was finally decided
in February 1833 when Carden was suspended
from the board of directors for making
statements prejudicial to the company. In June he
was also deprived of his position as registrar. (ref. 42)
After Garden's suspension the victory of the
Grecian faction, led by Paul, was at once celebrated
by the adoption of Griffith's plans (prepared
some months previously) for a nonconformist
chapel. (ref. 43) By this time the cemetery had
been consecrated, on 24 January 1833, by the
Bishop of London, and a small temporary
Anglican chapel had been erected. The first burial
took place on 31 January. (ref. 44)
By March 1834 the building of the nonconformist
chapel, the entrance gateway and lodges,
and the great enclosing wall had all been completed
to Griffith's designs, Chadwick being the
builder. (fn. e) The idea for the colonnaded 'catacombs'
which were built along part of the north wall was
apparently borrowed from a new cemetery at
Frankfurt. (ref. 45)
In June 1834 Francis Bedford exhibited at the
Royal Academy a model for a chapel for the
General Cemetery Company, (ref. 46) but it was Griffith
who in 1836 received the directors' request to
design the cemetery's principal monument, the
Church of England chapel and its catacombs.
This he did, again in the Grecian style beloved
by Paul, and by June 1837 the building had been
completed, Chadwick again being the contractor.
The temporary chapel was demolished in the
following year. (ref. 47)
Cemetery companies had by now become
generally accepted, and Griffith's precocious son,
William Pettit Griffith, also an architect, was
anxious to set himself up as an expert in this new
and doubtless lucrative field of professional
practice. In 1836 he published a design for a
cemetery chapel (very similar indeed to that of
his father), accompanied by a knowledgeable
commentary which concluded with the advice
that, in cemeteries where two chapels were required,
'each chapel should be constructed in a
different style of architecture: it would gratify the
tastes of all parties, and, at the same time, add to
the ornament of the cemeteries'. (ref. 48)
The two chapels are, however, both distinguished
essays in the manner of the Greek
Revival, and are built mainly of Portland stone
(Plates 29b, c, 30). They are prostyle tetrastyle,
the Anglican chapel being Doric, while that of the
nonconformists is Ionic. Both porticoes have
flanking colonnades, those on the nonconformist
chapel being curved, and both have brick vaulted
catacombs underneath, with stone coffin racks
and cast-iron protective grilles of similar detail
to balconies of the period (Plate 30b, c, d). In the
dark vaults, hundreds of coffins, many once
clothed in rich-hued velvets secured to the wood
by brass studs, lie in their loculi. An interesting
innovation in the Anglican chapel was the hydraulic
lowering device by which coffins were
taken down into the catacombs at the end of the
committal service. This chapel was damaged by
enemy action in 1940, and restored by E. R.
Bingham Harriss in 1954.
The gateway, flanked by single-storey lodges
and an office, is on the Harrow Road, and is
basically a triumphal arch with a giant Doric
order applied to its two storeys (Plate 29a).
An attic storey rises above the central arched
entrance.
During the first nineteen years of its existence
over 18,000 burials took place in the cemetery, (ref. 49)
and in the latter part of the nineteenth century
it was enlarged by the acquisition of more
ground to the west. A crematorium was built
here in 1938.
The monuments erected at Kensal Green
cemetery display the whole range of Victorian
taste, from early classical tombstones to the
strangest eclecticism of the latter part of the
century (Plates 31–2). Contemporary opinion
of most of them was in general very low—'What
a rendezvous of dreary inanities it is!' exclaimed
The Builder in 1854, and Ducrow's Egyptian
mausoleum of 1837 was singled out in particular
as an example of 'ponderous coxcombry'. (ref. 50) A
few monuments were, however, approved, including
those to Thomas Hood, the poet, by
Matthew Noble, to James Ward, the painter and
engraver, by J. H. Foley, and to General Forester
Walker by Edward Blore. (ref. 51)
Immediately in front of the Anglican chapel
are several tombs of distinguished design, among
them that of Princess Sophia (d. 1848), daughter
of George III, which consists of a beautiful
quattrocento sarcophagus set on a podium (Plate
32a). The design was by L. Grüner of Dresden,
and the sarcophagus was carved in Carrara marble
by the Signori Bardi, the podium being by Edward
Pearce. Nearby is the simple slab covering
the grave of the Duke of Sussex, who was so
shocked at the confusion at the funeral of King
William IV that he declared that he would not
be buried at Windsor. His nephew, the second
Duke of Cambridge (d. 1904), lies in a tomb of a
simplified Egyptian style. Mention may also be
made of the octagonal monument of 1866 to the
Molyneux family (Plate 31d), by John Gibson, a
spectacular example of High Victorian Gothic,
very much in the style of Scott, with rich polished
granites and finely carved detail, and having a
somewhat French appearance when seen among
the surrounding leafy arbours. The original
squat spire has been removed.
Figure 89:
Kensal Green Cemetery Chapel, plan, elevation and section
St. Mary's Roman Catholic Cemetery,
Harrow Road
This cemetery, which is entirely separate from
that of All Souls, Kensal Green, and is outside
the parish of Kensington, was opened on 10 May
1858. The chapel and the lodge were both erected
in 1860 to the designs of S. J. Nicholl. During the
first eight years of its existence some 12,500
burials took place, many of the Irish migrants
of the Great Famine years finding their last resting
place here. The surplus revenues from the
burial fees are used for the support of invalid
priests. (ref. 52)
The Church of St. Thomas, Kensal Road
The original church here was built in 1889 to the
designs of Demaine and Brierley of York, J.
Demaine being described as 'Diocesan Surveyor'.
The site was purchased by the trustees of the
Bishop of London's Church Building Fund for
£800, and a large part of the building expenses
was provided from funds which had accrued from
the amalgamation in 1886 of the benefice of St.
Thomas in the Liberty of the Rolls with that of
St. Dunstan in the West. The builders were
Thomas Gregory and Company of Clapham,
and the total cost about £5,500. The church was
consecrated on 28 October 1889. (ref. 53)
During the war of 1939–45 it was severely
damaged by enemy action. In 1951 the benefice
was united with that of St. Andrew and St. Philip,
Golborne Road, and in 1967 St. Thomas's was
completely rebuilt to the designs of Romilly B.
Craze.